Side-by-side photos of a forearm: on the left a faded grey bird with script lettering, on the right a colour peony with green leaves in a bold neo-traditional style.

Faded bird beside a red peony on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A split image shows the same forearm twice. The left panel has a faded grey tattoo of a small bird with script lettering, with soft, indistinct edges. The right panel shows a larger colour tattoo of a peony with pink and red petals, green leaves and dark outlines, with some black shading on the leaves and petals. The colour panel dominates the composition and the flower fills most of the forearm.

Botanical Neo-trad Forearm Peony Flower Leaves Bird Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost came down the valley the week after Martinmas and stayed. I spent most mornings breaking ice on the trough with the back of a spade, and most afternoons in the lean-to with the seed catalogues, because Gran's peony was still under the snow by the midden wall and nobody else was going to dig it up.

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She had carried the root up from a nursery in Kent the spring she married Grandad, wrapped in wet sacking on the train, and it had flowered every June since, pink going to red at the heart like a split plum. The year she died it bloomed anyway, out of pure cussedness, she would have said. Nobody in the family wanted it moved, so the bank around it grew ragged with nettles and the old swallow hook she'd nailed to the wall rusted until the bird on it was only a suggestion.

On the first hard day of February I took the fork to it. The clay had gone to iron, so I boiled a kettle and poured it round the crown before the tines would bite. Under a mat of rotted leaves the roots were pale and fat, and when I lifted the clump a scrap of paper came away on my glove, the label Gran had tied to the stake, its ink gone to a grey smudge that still held the shape of her capitals.

I replanted it on the south side where the wall breaks the wind, and I put the label in my coat pocket because I could not think what else to do with it. By June the nettles will have lost interest in the old bank, and whatever comes up there will be pink and red and loud, and the people who walk past will look at the flowers and not at the ground.